Anne Rice is having more fun than ever. As we sit down to talk about her latest novel, 'Prince Lestat,' it seems clear that she's driven to explore new and uncharted territory. All she needs is a word processor and the worlds that she has created.

To be honest, I love talking to Anne Rice because she's just as enthusiastic as I am. She knows and loves her books and thinks deeply about what she does and how she does it. Of course, part of what she does is unthinking. She's one of the masters of reaching into her own vat of swirling emotions and sensibilities and pulling out a story, writing it up from nothing. She's summoning.

One of the themes we followed this time around is Anne's own changing sensibilities. When she got into the horror fiction business, she managed a neat trick. She turned her own grief and horror into novels that partook of the fantastic but didn't seem to.

Now, she's come to the point where she's mastered the fantasy and even the science fiction elements behind her novels. She doesn't go so far as to turn them into "hard SF," but she's pretty hard-headed in crafting plots that would play out in the real world. Her so-called supernatural vampires embrace science, and they need to.

You can hear Anne Rice having the time of her life discussing the movies based on her books, other authors in her realm, including the author of a rather well-known British fantasy series, and all things vampiric, spiritual, and neuroscientific by following this link to the MP3 audio file.

Here's the one-hundred eighty-fifth episode of my series of podcasts, which I'm calling Time to Read, or when I warn the writer in advance, the lightning round. This is turning out to be really fun, and especially since I get to take on my game show host persona.

This week, I'm way behind, but who knows what the hell might happen. I am hoping to get back up and stumbling. I have lots of great books in the hopper to review and lots of great interviews to podcast.

While the podcast file title says three, this edition of Three Books With Alan Cheuse is actually Four. As w were gearing up, Alan mentioned Maureen Corrigan's book, 'So We Read On,' and we decided in the moment to add that to our list. I spoke with Corrigan about the book, which I really enjoyed, as did Alan. My review of it is here. My conversation with Corrigan is here.

We spoke next about a great new debut thriller, Casey Walker's 'Last Days in Shanghai.' I'm a sucker for any novel with Shanghai as the setting since my father was born there. (He ended up in the camp down the way from J. G. Ballard, and returned with the family to the States after the war.) This novel has a real, urgent feeling of zeitgeist that, added to the well-turned plot, makes it especially compelling.

We went on to a Ron Rash collection, sort of a "best of," titlde 'Something Rich and Strange.' It lives up to the title and the settings, mostly Appalachian. For me there was a strong Flannery O'Connor vibe to these stories. Cheuse and I spoke about short stories in general, supposedly not beloved of either publishers or readers, but nonetheless quite appealing in this Age of Limited Attention.

"You really have to enter a world and it's not some kind of guided tour."

— Anne-Sylvie Salzman

One of the great highlights of my trip to Europe was the opportunity to talk to Anne-Sylvie Salzman about the creation of the stories in her collection 'Darkscapes,' and discovering that she has a large body of yet un-translated work out there. As you can hear, she has a lot of published fiction that would sound must-buy-ish even if I hadn't read 'Darkscapes' and found it flat-out amazing, and horrifying.

Salzman is insightful when discussing her own work, but her insights in a more general sense offer a profound and unique sense of how the fantastic can be an essential building block of fine literature. Yet for all her literary inclinations, Salzman delivers solid stories that will just creep the hell out of you.

We talked about the weird in general and then covered most of the stories in the book. Some of these stories may get sequels, in itself news to rejoice. But over and over again, I found myself startled by how Salzman's perceptions of her own craft and process spoke to more general visions of writing both in and out of genre.

Given that Salzman's stories here are all pretty firmly in the horror genre, I was heartened to hear that her novels go father afield. We can only hope that they are translated sooner rather than later. In the interim, you can hear my conversation with Anne-Sylvie Salzman about what I feel is one of the best books of horror fiction in recent years by following this link to the MP3 file of our conversation.